Dance for Sports

Book excerpt: In Dance for Sports, author, teacher, dancer, athlete, and researcher Margo Apostolos offers a new training approach for athletes and coaches that synthesizes common techniques between athletics and dance. By utilizing this approach, in- and off-season athletes can improve efficiency and technique. Throughout the book, Apostolos shows the potential exchange between sport and dance in exercises that focus on overlapping physical components of both practices including flexibility, strength, coordination, agility, balance, and timing. She also demonstrates how dance serves sport as a cross training activity with additional opportunities for athletes to explore creativity, improvisation, and mindfulness. Discussion with athletes from several sports interweaves each chapter to expand the learning process and offer useful anecdotes. Based upon the author's decades-long career and extensive experience with athletes and coaches in a variety of sports such as football, basketball, swimming, tennis, track and field and more, Dance for Sports provides a fully integrative guide for students and instructors alike.